MUI adoption guide: Overview, examples, and alternatives

While Material UI is the core component library in the MUI ecosystem, other available solutions include:

• — Unlike MUI and Joy UI, Base UI follows the headless approach, meaning that none of its UI components come shipped with styles. It gives you greater control over the CSS and styling of the components


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Why use MUI

Let’s discuss some reasons why you should consider MUI as your go-to React component library.

Speeds up development

MUI provides over 50 components that you can plug into your project. This eliminates having to build components from scratch, write tests for those components, and maintain their individual codebase. Instead, you can integrate these ready-to-use components to quickly assemble complex layouts and interfaces.

Promotes brand consistency

MUI is built on the Material Design guidelines, a set of design principles and best practices developed by Google to help brands create user-friendly experiences and promote consistency. Using MUI allows you to build a visually pleasing interface across your applications.

Enforces web accessibility

MUI components comply fully with the WCAG accessibility standards:

• Users can navigate through them with a keyboard


• MUI components apply appropriate ARIA attributes to , free and paid starter templates, and more.
  
  
  

  Another benefit is that you can find several real-world examples and implementations of MUI. Whether you're building a complex dashboard, a multi-step form, or a responsive layout, chances are someone has already created something similar with MUI.

  
  
  

  If you can find an existing project containing components you want to use, then instead of building from scratch, you can clone the code for that project — presuming it’s open sourced — and make adjustments to suit your needs.

  
  
  

  
  
  
  Boasts a large collection of themes and templates
  

  
  
  

  
  



• with detailed explanations and examples to streamline the development process.
  
  
  

  
  
  
  Bundle size
  

  
  
  

  MUI's extensive collection of components and styles can result in a larger bundle size, which may impact the initial load time of your application. If you’re working on a performance-critical project, MUI may not be the best choice.

  
  
  

  
  
  
  Opinionated design and custom needs
  

  
  
  

  MUI’s opinionated design is a double-edged sword. Although it encourages building accessible, consistent, and visually appealing interfaces, its design may not align with all project design requirements.

  
  
  

  While you can customize MUI’s default theme and deviate from Material Design principles, this can be challenging and time-consuming, especially because there are so many customization options to sort through. We’ll discuss customizing MUI in more detail below.

  
  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
  Features of MUI
  

  
  
  

  Let’s explore some of the features MUI offers.

  
  
  

  
  
  
  Predefined components
  

  
  
  

  
  



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Supports customizations

MUI allows you to control the appearance of your components. You can customize properties like the color palette, typography, font, spacing, and breakpoints to match your brand’s requirements.

Responsive design

MUI offers different features that help you build responsive layouts that adjust to various screen sizes. These include:

• The grid system, which is built on CSS Flexbox, follows a 12-column layout, and provides a flexible way to arrange content


• The Container component that allows you to wrap and center content on a screen


• Five predefined breakpoints:
  
  
  
  
  • xs (extra-small): 0px to 600px
  
  
  • sm (small): 600px to 899px
  
  
  • md (medium): 900px to 1199px
  
  
  • lg (large): 1200px to 1535px
  
  
  • xl (extra-large): 1536px and up
  
  
  
  
  
  



• The useMediaQuery Hook, which allows you to apply styles or render components conditionally based on the current viewport size

The below snippet shows the different components of MUI’s responsive design capabilities:

import Grid from "@mui/material/Grid";

import Container from '@mui/material/Container';

import { useMediaQuery } from '@mui/material/useMediaQuery';



//grid system with beakpoints applied

export default function BasicGrid() {

  return (

    <Grid container spacing={2}>

      <Grid xs={6} sm={6} md={3} >{/* app content */}</Grid>

      <Grid xs={4}>{/* app content */}</Grid>

      <Grid xs={4}>{/* app content */}</Grid>

    </Grid>

  );

}



//Container component

export default function SimpleContainer() {

  return <Container maxWidth="sm">{/* app content */} </Container>;

}



//useMediaQuery hook

export default function MyComponent() {

  const isSmallScreen = useMediaQuery('(max-width:600px)');



  return (

    <div>

      {isSmallScreen ? 'Small screen' : 'Large screen'}

    </div>

  );

}

Further reading:

Getting started with MUI

Follow this quickstart guide to get started with MUI. First, for various purposes, including admin dashboards, landing pages, and ecommerce sites. These templates serve as an excellent starting point for developers. Meanwhile:

• The Chakra UI community has created various templates and theme examples, though not as extensively as MUI. There is also and for various project types

Maturity and adoption

MUI was released in 2014 and has been a top choice for building UI interfaces. It’s used by companies like Auth0, Codementor, Medium, Nhnost, and Shutterstock. It has a large and active community that continually supports its growth with learning materials, themes, and templates.

In comparison:

• Chakra UI was released in 2020 and is used by companies like Udacity, Ethereum, Solidity, and Suno


• Shadcn UI was released in 2023 and is used by companies like Vercel, Flatiron Health, and Codedamn. While it’s relatively new compared to their libraries, its unique approach of providing direct access to a copy component’s source code, combined with the fact that it is built on Shadcn UI and Tailwind CSS, has made it a fan favorite


• Radix UI was released in 2020 and is used by companies like Codesandbox, Vercel, Liveblocks, Supabase, Linear, and Open AI. It enjoys widespread adoption and is commonly used to build internal design systems and other component libraries


• Ant Design was released in 2017 and is used by companies like Xiaomi, Snapchat, and Shopify

The table below compares some additional stats about each library:

Further reading:

Conclusion

MUI stands out as a powerful and versatile UI component library for React development. Its comprehensive set of features make it a compelling choice for building visually appealing and accessible user interfaces.

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